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Maciej Cegłowski (previously) gave this talk, "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People," at Web Camp Zagreb last October, spending 45 minutes delving into the origin of the idea that computers are going to become apocalyptic, self-programming, superintelligent basilisks that end all live on Earth (and variations on this theme) and then explaining why this fundamentally evidence-free, fuzzy idea has colonized so many otherwise brilliant people -- including people like Stephen Hawking -- and why it's an irrational and potentially harmful belief system.
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In SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video, researchers from MIT's computer science department describe their success in using software image-recognition to automate sound recognition: once software can use video analysis to decide what's going on in a clip, it can then use that understanding to label the sounds in the clip, and thus accumulate a model for understanding sound, without a human having to label videos first for training purposes.
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A decade ago, I published the first Madeline Ashby story to see print, "In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock n' Roll," in Tesseracts 11; four years ago, I reviewed her outstanding debut novel, vN, and then revelled in its sequel a year later: but now, a decade later, Ashby is an overnight success, with a breakout novel about love, labor, shame, sex and Singularity cultists: Company Town.

Philosopher John Danaher's new paper "Will life be worth living in a world without work?
Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life" assumes that after the robots take all our jobs, and after the economic justice of figuring out how to share the productivity games can be equitably shared among the robot-owning investor class and the robot-displaced 99%, there will still be a burning question: what will give our life meaning?
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Ben Hansford writes about his Kickstarter campaign for a short film called "Uprising - A Post-Apocalyptic Robot Comedy,"On the surface it's a comedy - but at its heart it's a story about me (an idiot man-child) becoming a responsible father. It's also a one-man show, with me doing all of the development, production, post, and visual effects on a shoe-string budget. But most importantly, Uprising is my chance to do my film, my way, with my friends and family by my side."
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In the EU and the USA, high-profile, high-budget programs are underway to simulate a human brain. While these produce some pretty pictures of simulations, they don't display much rigor or advancement of our understanding of how brains work.
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Maciej Cegłowski's "Web Design: The First 100 Years" is a characteristically provocative riff on the past and future of "progress" that asks the question, if aviation stopped producing faster, more powerful aircraft in the 1970s, will the IT industry do the same?
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Blackstone has produced a new audiobook edition of Rapture of the Nerds, the gonzo post-Singularity novel Charlie Stross and I published in 2012, read by John Lee -- as with all my Downpour audio titles, it's DRM-free and available without territorial restrictions (tell your friends!).
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As I've writtenbefore,
Karl Schroeder is one of the sharpest, canniest thinkers about
technology and science fiction I know. In the nearly 30 years I've
know him, he's introduced me to fractals, free software, Unix,
listservers, SGML, augmented reality, the Singularity, and a host of
other ideas -- generally 5-10 years before I heard about these ideas
from anyone else. What's more, he's a dynamite novelist with
a finely controlled sense of character and plot to go with all those
Big Ideas.

I've just come home from two months overseas to discover a great big exciting box of shiny new paperbacks for Rapture of the Nerds, the comic Singularity that Charlie Stross and I wrote together. As spiffy as the hardcover was, I'm even more pleased with the paperback cover-art. What's more, it's out in time for Christmas, which is quite a nice surprise -- I hadn't expected that! As with all my other books, this one is a Creative Commons download, too.
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